Empiricism
Empiricism.
Two distinct modes of thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been called empiricism. One is a methodology for natural philosophy proposed early in the century by Francis Bacon, later by members of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (1660), and finally by John Locke and Isaac Newton. So successful was this methodology perceived to be, most notably in the hands of Newton, that it was eventually viewed as the key to investigation in other areas, such as psychology, ethics, and politics. It was just such a method that Locke proposed to follow in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which was very influential in the development of the second school of thought that might be called empiricism: the epistemological theory that the ultimate source of human ideas and knowledge is experience, and that the human mind enters the world as a blank page, or tabula rasa.
Bacon, in Novum Organon (1620), insisted that progress in natural philosophy would not be made by “reasoners,” “men of dogma” who, like spiders, make cobwebs “out of their own substance”; nor would it be made by our collecting, antlike, a “mere medly and ill-digested mass” of experience and observations. Instead, we should be like bees: they not only gather pollen from the flowers but also digest and assimilate it, transforming it into useful honey by their own powers.
To a significant extent, Bacon inspired the foundation in 1660 of the London Royal Society, a learned society whose dedication to new learning and the conception of natural philosophy as experimental was shortly emulated by others throughout Europe. His influence was frequently attested by its members, even though they did not always look beyond his pollen-gathering stage. In Bacon's books, said Thomas Sprat, the Society's contemporary historian, “are every where scattered the best arguments, that can be produced for the defence of experimental philosophy and the best directions, that are needful to promote it.” Robert Boyle, the seventeenth-century chemist, referred to him as “one of the first and greatest experimental philosophers of our age.”
Locke, too, was a member of the Royal Society, and his Essay, with its account of the differences between natural philosophy and rationalistic sciences such as geometry, contains a defense of the same methodology, which he called “the historical, plain method.” He argued that, because of our ignorance of the real essences of things, in the case of knowledge of the world around us, we are “left only to observation and experiment.”
When the same methodology was proposed by Newton, it was lent a persuasive authority by its association with what was seen as a remarkable example of its fruitfulness: the towering achievement of (as Locke described him) “the incomparable” Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687), which, with its laws of motion and theory of gravitation, gave a unified account of terrestrial and celestial motions. Bacon, Locke, and particularly Newton were heroic figures for the eighteenth century. In due course, they were enthusiastically introduced to France by, among others, Voltaire in his Lettres sur les Anglais (1734) and Éléments de la Philosophie de Newton (1738); they were praised as intellectual giants in Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert's Encylopédie (1751 on), a work inspired by Bacon in its very conception as a repository of knowledge.
Experience and Observation
The empirical experimental method as the eighteenth century conceived it, was entirely in line with Bacon's suggestion that we should not only gather pollen from the flowers of experience but also assimilate it by our own powers of reason. Though sense experience must always be the arbiter, we must not merely collect a mass of ill-digested observations. We must either make inductions from our experience to general laws or experiment to test hypothetical suggestions about such laws against that experience. In his Optice (1704), Newton wrote that we should begin “in making experiments and observations,” then move to “drawing general conclusions from them”; we should admit “no objections about the conclusions but such as are taken from experiment or other certain truths.”
An obvious feature of Newton's Principia was the use it made of mathematics. Although this was clearly essential to the advances he had made in bringing together many apparently disparate phenomena, it was not taken to be similarly essential to the empirical method in general. In 1754 Diderot, in his De l'interprétation de la nature, without in any way seeking to denigrate Newton's achievement, suggested that there were limits to the usefulness of abstract mathematics in the investigation of the world, and that the way forward was a more purely descriptive, less systematizing approach. Indeed, new life sciences such as geology, biology, and botany were emerging without help from mathematics. The comte de Buffon's multivolume Histoire naturelle (1749 on) and Pierre-Louis Maupertuis's Système de la nature (1751) still appealed to Newton and the experimental method, but they argued that his mathematical approach, fruitful as it had been in its own field, was not suitable for the interpretation of organic phenomena.
Buffon's and Diderot's sense that the data of complex organic nature could not always be made to fit the concepts and formulas of mathematics was in tune with a more general theme of the empiricism of their time. Bacon had contrasted the proper procedure of the bee with the nonexperiential, intellectualistic method of the spider, which spins webs out of its own substance. In the eyes of the eighteenth century, the thinkers of the seventeenth had not always avoided the spiderlike construction of dogmatic, a priori metaphysical systems; René Descartes in France and Wilhelm Gottfried von Leibniz in Germany were often mentioned, for example by Voltaire, in this connection.
The dislike of beginning with a priori principles rather than with an openness to undistorted experience was already present in Locke. While praising the achievements of Boyle and Newton, he referred to the “uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms, introduced into the sciences” by the Scholastics. This antipathy emerged yet more clearly in David Hume, who in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) rejected as “sophistry and illusion” any book that contained neither mathematics nor “experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact.” Most explicitly, Hume commented with satisfaction that “Men are now cured of their passions for systems in natural philosophy and will not accept anything not derived from experience” (Enquiry Concerning Morals, 1751). As d'Alembert explained, it was one thing to do what Newton did—to order nature systematically (with an esprit systématique) in terms of a small number of principles—when this was revealed or supported by careful observation; it was quite another thing to elaborate purely rational hypotheses unsupported by empirical evidence (with an esprit de système). Étienne Condillac's Traité des systèmes (1749) is explicitly devoted to making these same points. Condillac rejected metaphysical systems such as those of Descartes and Leibniz, instead praising the systematic procedures of a careful Newtonian experimental philosophy. As the baron d'Holbach was to warn, “Man always deceives himself when he abandons experience to follow imaginary systems” (Système de la nature, 1770).
Application of Empiricism to Other Fields
The experimental method was nonetheless thought to have a significance beyond the natural sciences. The foundation of ethics might be reached, wrote Hume, “by following the experimental method, and deducing general maxims from a comparison of particular instances” (Enquiry Concerning Morals); indeed, for Hume, “the only solid foundation we can give to the science of man must be laid on experience and observation” (Treatise of Human Nature, 1739–1740).
Throughout this period, there was considerable interest in the experimental “science of man,” in particular the investigation of human nature and human psychology. The thought was not just that mankind itself, as a part of the world like any other, was a proper subject for study. It was the more complex notion that, by understanding ourselves better, we would be better able to understand knowledge and all its objects. Hume thus argued that “all the sciences have a relation…to human nature.” “Even mathematics, natural philosophy, and natural religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of man; since they lie under the cognizance of man, and are judged of by their powers and faculties” (Treatise). Similarly, d'Alembert's approach to knowledge and its objects saw them in relation to the nature of the knowing subject. This anthropocentric approach to knowledge appeared in an extreme and detailed form in the “transcendental idealism” of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781), according to which space and time are the forms of human intuition which, together with the categories of our understanding, we ourselves bring to bear on our otherwise uncategorized sense impressions.
Locke's Essay was of seminal significance for these reflexive investigations into the nature of thinking and understanding. It was a classic expression of something else which is called empiricism, something distinct from the “experimental” methodology advocated for natural philosophy. Empiricism in this second sense was a theoretical doctrine about the contents of the mind in general (knowledge, beliefs, ideas, and concepts); it proposed that these contents are all ultimately relatable to experience and sensory input and have no meaning or scope other than what is licensed by experience. According to Voltaire, what philosophers before Locke had produced were really only novels about the human mind; Locke, however, had “written its history.”
Intending to follow the “plain, historical method,” Locke announced his aim of searching out the origin of knowledge and its limits. There are explicitly nonempiricist, intellectualistic elements in his conclusions, because he held that knowledge, as in mathematics and possibly ethics, involves the use of reason to grasp connections between ideas that are necessary but not evident in experience. However, the ideas themselves—the “materials of knowledge,” as he put it—are, he is quite clear, derived from experience.
Locke, then, gave an account of how all the contents of our minds—all the materials on which the whole of our knowledge and beliefs is based—are derived from the “ideas” that we receive either by the interaction of our senses with the world or from observation of the operations of our own minds. “In all that great extent wherein the mind wanders, in those remote speculations, it may seem to be elevated with, it stirs not one jot beyond those ideas, which sense or reflection have offered,” he wrote. The ensuing Essay was a systematic attempt to work this out in detail.
This doctrine that the mind begins as “white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas,” is clearly inconsistent with the belief in innate, connatural ideas that figured in the theorizing of some earlier seventeenth-century philosophers (Descartes, the Cambridge Platonists associated with Henry More, and Ralph Cudworth). The lengthy attack on innate ideas with which Locke accordingly began derived some of its energy from his thought that appeal to them had often been simply a way of reinforcing established authority and doctrine, and thus a way of bypassing the responsibility that each of us should individually take for our beliefs.
Views of Locke by Other Philosophers
There were some items in Locke's inventory of the contents of the mind that later philosophers thought either should not be there or had not been sufficiently explained. The Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley, in his Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), pushed Locke's sensationist empiricism further by rejecting his idea of material substance and conceiving the external world not as the cause of our ideas, but as a construction out of them. Hume's Treatise, though more nuanced in its conclusions, showed a similar skepticism about Locke's clear distinction between a world and our ideas of it; it went yet further than Berkeley in rejecting even an immaterial substantial mind of which our ideas are supposed to be modifications.
Hume adopted much of Locke's conceptual and structural apparatus (for example, the distinction between simple and complex ideas), but he developed some of it further. Locke saw a distinction between ideas as constituting the initial data of experience and ideas as constituting our thinking or memory. Hume, however, needed to introduce the terminology of impressions and ideas to mark the distinction more clearly, because it is of great importance in what he wrote about the “principles of association” that govern the formation of belief in general, as well as the origination of our particular beliefs concerning the external world, a substantial self, and causation.
The view of the mind as initially a tabula rasa, and the theory of ideas that, following Locke, took ideas to be “the immediate objects of the mind in thinking” were attacked by Thomas Reid, the founder of the Scottish common sense philosophical school. For Reid, rather than giving a satisfactory account of our mental structure, what Locke had begun had inevitably led (as in the skepticism Reid saw in Berkeley and Hume) to a denial of various items of knowledge that we all know we have. In Reid's view, we should begin by recognizing, as “part of our constitution,” certain “original and natural judgements”: for instance, what we directly perceive is not our ideas, but the material world itself; our perception of a tree is not simply a sensory datum but also involves, as part of its nature, a belief in the tree's existence. The data out of which the ideists construct our beliefs—what they take to be primary experiential data—are in fact secondary to those beliefs and merely the result of the analysis of them. The Scottish common sense school included Dugald Stewart, who, like Reid, postulated fundamental laws of human belief, that “form an essential part of our constitution.” He, too, rejected the tabula rasa of strict empiricism, though the methodology he espoused for his study of man was that of experimental philosophy: all we should aim to do is to ascertain the general laws that regulate the association of ideas and other workings of the mind; we should go no further than “facts for which we have the evidence of our own consciousness.”
Locke was read by most as picturing the mind as passive in the reception of simple ideas from experience, and as active in various operations on them (abstracting, comparing, judging, compounding). This meant that there was a sense in which it was misleading to portray mind as originally white paper or an empty cabinet; moreover, though he discussed in some detail just what those operations were, he simply took for granted, as an unexplained datum, that the mind could perform them. Condillac believed that Locke's empiricism was therefore somewhat impure, and he aimed to radicalize it by showing how those operations did not merely concern the data of sense, but developed as a response to them: they were themselves “transformed sensations.”
Condillac's Traité des sensations (1754) used the device of an imaginary statue, with no antecedent mental powers, which is endowed with the various modalities of sense, one by one. Equipped only with the sense of smell and presented with a rose, the statue, conscious of nothing else, simply is that smell. However, there being nothing but that sensation, the statue in effect already is in a state of attention. Once attention is derived, much else follows. Memory is the attention to a past sensation insofar as an impression of it remains; judgment results from comparison, or attending to two ideas at the same time. Similarly, imagining, abstracting, counting, and knowing are seen as forms of attention. The statue acquires passions from sensation, too: love, hate, hope, and so on are different forms of desire that develop in the statue when, given memory, it realizes that its sensations, which cause it varying degrees of pleasure or pain, can change. So, Condillac concluded, it is not merely, as with Locke, that sensation provides all the materials for mental activities; rather, sensation gives rise to those activities themselves.
Reflexive self-awareness was also taken for granted by Locke. He saw as obvious, in fact following Descartes, the principle that in having sensations we are aware of ourselves having them. Condillac also accounted for this self-awareness by derivation from sensation, though for it, he argued, the statue required more than one sense in order to distinguish itself from a single state of sensation. Moreover, out of all the senses, that of touch was crucially important: by means of it, the statue, as it encounters obstacles to its movement, becomes aware of a world, other than itself, that causes its sensations.
Condillac's radical empiricism was taken up by Claude Helvétius in De l'esprit (1758). Condillac had wanted to show how our mental activities, which Locke had taken for granted, could themselves be traced back to sensation; nevertheless, in explaining the temporal development of those activities from bodily sensation in this way, he did not mean to deny the existence of an active immaterial soul. Helvétius, however, combined the kind of empiricist analysis of mental activities Condillac had given with a thoroughly deterministic materialism in which all mental activity could be derived from the physical senses.
Locke's empiricist project—to show how the whole of human knowledge can ultimately be accounted for in terms of the data of sensation—came to an end with Kant. He agreed with Locke that “all our knowledge begins with experience,” but he reasoned that “it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.” He had, he wrote, been awakened “from his dogmatic slumbers” by what seemed to be the skeptical thrust of Hume's account of our belief in causal necessity in terms of the association of ideas. He found the empiricist notion of the derivation of concepts from the material of experience to be too simple. Space and time, he argued, are a priori forms of human sensibility; substance and cause are a priori forms of thought. They are a priori conditions of the very possibility of experience, and not things given to us in that experience.
[See also Epistemology; Locke, John; Philosophy; Rationalism; Reason; and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy.]
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Buchdahl, Gerd. The Image of Newton and Locke in the Age of Reason. London and New York, 1961. An account, with useful illustrative texts, of the influence of Locke and Newton on the eighteenth century.Find this resource:
Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy: Hobbes to Hume. London, 1959. A sound history.Find this resource:
Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy: Wolff to Kant. London, 1960. Includes discussion of the French philosophes.Find this resource:
Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Vol. 2. London, 1970. See chapter 3, “The Uses of Nature,” and chap. 4, “The Science of Man.”Find this resource:
Jacobson, Anne Jaap. David Hume on Human Understanding. In British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Stuart Brown, pp. 150–178. London and New York, 1996.Find this resource:
Jimack, Peter. The French Enlightenment I: Science, Materialism and Determinism. In British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Stuart Brown, pp. 228–250. London and New York, 1996.Find this resource:
Rogers, G. A. J. Science and British Philosophy: Boyle and Newton. In British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Stuart Brown, pp. 43–68. London and New York, 1996.Find this resource:
Tipton, Ian. Locke: Knowledge and Its Limits. In British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Stuart Brown, pp. 69–95. London and New York, 1996.Find this resource:
Woolhouse, R. S. The Empiricists. Oxford, 1988. A discussion of empiricism from Bacon to Hume.Find this resource:
Yolton, John W. Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding. Cambridge, 1970. Chaps. 1–5 discuss Locke's empirical approach to natural philosophy.Find this resource: